Volume One of the five-volume natural history series presenting human evolution. What is the significance of the fact that our species is not just a passing experiment--which is of course a very intelligent impression from contemporary observation--but is the outcome of FOUR MILLION YEARS of development! Of course, the series is limited to the illumination of more mundanely eternal questions: Who are we? Where did we come from?

Volume One takes this story to 10,000 BC. This includes a close examination of the Apes, and even origins of language, migration routes, pre-urban settlement patterns, and precursors of what passes for the "culture" of people. Stunning photographs and charts showing artifacts and bone.

Long view of the Olduvai opening to the Serengeti Plain to Ngorongoro Crater, pointing up to the Sinai and the Urals beyond. The Habilenes, Erectines, and Neanderthals in the final vector towards Sapiency. UPDATE: 2006 Australopithecus afarensis discovery reported in NATURE is now the oldest child, at 3.3 million (cf Lucy found in 1974 at 3.2 million) years.

Great Chapters on Cave Art. So far, the earliest "tools" are the 2 million ago Olduvan river rock choppers [56]. The earliest "art", the carved vulvas spread over a broad Eurasian area in the Upper Paleolithic period of increasing cold dating back to almost 30,000 ago [103, 106]. Cave paintings appear 24,000 {Update: Chauvin 30,000} with true flowering between 12,000 to 20,000 ago. We managed to depict animals we were hunting to their extinction--the Woolly Rhinocerous, Auroch, Przewalski Horse, Mammoth. (NB: Animals were also bigger back then-- now called "megafauna" [even the Pleistocene Bison 185]).

The Pacific cultures are not overlooked--with pioneering navigators (out of sight of land) arriving about 30,000 ago. The Clovis, Goshen, and Folsom associated complexes which formed around 12,000 ago followed the last glacial maximum of the Laurentide ice sheet at 18,000. Note the rising sea levels submerging the continental shelf. And the Mastodon, camels, horses and giant beavers and sloths (6 meter, 3 ton)--bigger animals--feeding on taller grasses, bigger trees, monster fungi. And also dire wolves, huge lions and cheetahs, and the "short-faced" bear -- twice the size of our largest present grizzly. Confirms pre-Clovis hunting of these megafauna [188].

One of the earliest and largest paleo-indian sites is Hell Gap, a deeply stratified work developed in the 1960's in southeast Wyoming. This is where the pre-Clovis-Folsom culture known as "Goshen" was confirmed, with no evidence of its relation to Clovis. Great bone-bed studies--use of U-shaped dune bowls, arroyo gradients, and cliffs. By 10,000 ago, although they survived the glacial maximum, the megafauna were extinct. They did not survive the Clovis Points [206].

The "last of the habitable lands"--an arguable description for some of us--was the Arctic, occupied about 4,500 ago. While some areas of Siberia and the Yukon actually get colder, the light extremes and the annual heat budget make life parlous [210]. Yet, our kind adapted to the perma-frost, and a diet consisting almost entirely of meat in the immediate neighborhood of sea-ice, land-ice, air-ice, polar bears (3.5 meters), orcas, and did we mention ice? 30,000 ago, early settlement appears related to Siberian/ Aldan River regions, and even boreal taiga.

About 2000 BC, the Denbigh emerged with distinctive tools, many remarkably small, delicately flaked and specialized, along the Alaskan coast [212]. The "small tool tradition" can be traced all the way to Greenland, although the direction is not entirely clear. Inexplicably, by the time of the Dorset Culture, which produced the greatest art (carvings)[223], the use of arrows, drills and hunting dogs completely disappeared [222]. Eventually so did the Dorsets. 200 years later, the region was re-occuppied by unrelated people from the south and west, the Norton peoples with larger more permanent settlements who exploited the sea to a greater extent [224]. One of the most fascinating arrivals was the Scytho-Siberian Ipiutak culture around 0 BC/AD. The ancestors of the present Inuit arrived around 500 AD.[225] The Thule were "fully" Arctic-adapted with kayaks for sea and umiaks for snow-land traversion and the techniques for hunting ringed seals at their holes in the sea-ice, which enabled the hunter to take prey during winter, and which were perfected around 1200 AD.

http://keylawk.blogspot.com/2007/10/cave-paintings-what-we-learn-about ( )